A DARK ROOM

GAME INFO:
A Dark Room starts with a few lines of text on a black screen: “the fire is dead. the room is cold. awake. head throbbing. vision blurry.” A bright-blue line cuts across the center of the screen, just below the words “stoke fire.” You press the words and suddenly the screen turns white. More text arrives: a ragged stranger has stumbled through the door. You keep stoking the fire, the thin blue bar disappearing and then slowly filling itself out again each time to signal when you’ll be able to press the “stoke fire” button again.
What follows is a strange hybrid, part mystery story and part smartphone productivity software, an app that inexplicably rocketed to the most-downloaded spot in the App Store’s games section in April and stayed there throughout the month. A product of a collaboration between two men who worked together without ever having met in person, the game evokes the simplest text-based computer games of the nineteen-seventies while stimulating a very modern impulse to constantly check and recheck one’s phone. It’s like a puzzle composed of deconstructed to-do lists.